Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, confidence and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.

Sunday, 29 September 2013

Suffering with serious post-Ibiza
blues this week, not to mention a suspicious cough. I'm still working
on the holiday blog post(s).

I finished reading Kill Your
Friends, by John Niven. A hilarious satire on Britain's music
industry, the novel tells of Steven Stelfox's bloodthirsty attempts
to rise to the power in the A+R department of an unnamed and secretly
struggling record label. It's been noted by many critics that there
are a good number of parallels to Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho,
but there are plenty of differences and twists in the tale to keep
Ellis fans surprised. The writing style is very similar, though.

Ibiza has beaten me senseless. It
was an incredible holiday, but I've been so tired since- streaming
eyes, a chesty cough, lack of concentration- but NEXT WEEK I will
straighten myself out. I jumped straight back in at the gym,
struggling through a few classes, dawdling through a few gym
sessions, not being able to get anywhere close to my PBs. But I'm on
the cough medicine (literally, no metaphor) and I've got a fridge
full of fruit.

This
week I decided to read Neil Strauss' Emergency whilst treadmill
walking at the gym. The book is broken up into 5 main parts. I read
in intervals, breaking to work the abs between each “part” of the
book. Here's how long it took:

Part
1 (introduction): 17min

Part
2: 1hr 53 min

Part
3: 2hr 53 min

Part
4 (incomplete): 60 min

I
make this a total of 6943 minutes: 6 hours 3 minutes. Correct me in
the comments if I'm wrong...

I
gave up some way through part 4 as my legs had seized up, as had my
brain.

Advice
if you're going to do this:

Walk
at a steady pace. 5Kph was fine. The slower you walk, the longer you
can work for.

Make
sure your breaks are long enough to give your legs a real rest. At
least 5 minutes.

Drink
LOTS of water. Not only will you sweat a lot, you won't be eating
any food, so you'll need it to keep your stomach full and fend off
hunger pangs.

Pick
a treadmill not too close to any speakers. Even Kissfresh can
get irritating after a few hours, and you want to keep the music as
“background” as possible. Also try and find one near a window.
You're going to be here a few hours, so you might as well get all
the sunlight you can.

I
got more than halfway through the book. Where The Game was an
autobiography / guide to pickup, Emergency is more Strauss' account
of learning modern-day survival techniques for preparation against a
range of loosely defined dangers that today's society can unleash on
us. Although interesting to see what a man will do to “protect”
himself from supposed perils out there in the big bad world, Strauss
and the survivalists he encounters come across as slightly paranoid
doomsday-willers, stocking up on guns and knives for security
reasons, gleefully preparing against hypothetical threats, and
killing and eating animals just to see if they could go through with
it. I couldn't help think, why put yourself through all this when an
apocalypse HASN'T happened? Surely you'd MAKE yourself do these
things after the asteroid / zombie outbreak / plague HAS hit us? But
I suppose it's easier to learn in a current, comparatively safe
contemporary environment.

Sunday, 1 September 2013

I've
been hammering the hand-bike recently, a machine for upper body
toning. My original PB- recorded in August last year- was much higher
than the attempt I recently made on returning to it. My guess is that
I'd not paid attention to the level of difficulty I'd set the machine
to on my first attempt, so I've started the process again at Level 5,
and hit a distance much higher than the original from 13 months ago.

Away
from the gym I finished reading Dom Joly's The Dark Tourist, a
first-hand account of the comedian's tour of the world's most
unlikely- and most uncomfortable- holiday destinations. I read a
large part of this on a gym workout project (see here).
Coming back to the book, I found that the content was quite
interesting. After all, where else have you heard of 3-hour
North-Korean stage plays or acid-ingesting cocktail barmen in Beirut?

Eventually,
though, Joly's excursions take their toll- you get the feeling he's
doing these trips to be zany, rather than because of a genuine
interest in the countries he visits. Yes, you could go skiing on the
segregated slopes of Iran, but why would that be enjoyable? What do
you hope to gain from this? Although interesting- and funny- in
places, Joly's pompous ramblings and over-wordy phrasing becomes
tiresome. Too many sentences started with “It was” followed by an
adjective that we can work out for ourselves. Yes, Dom. I'm quite
sure that passing a 12-year-old girl “energetically conducting”
an orchestra of pioneers on a Pyongyang high street under an enormous
poster of Kim Jong Il would be “totally surreal”. I can gauge
that from your description.

An
interesting book, but Joly's obsession with himself is too evident,
something publishers Simon & Schuster should have reigned in to
make shorter.

Moving
on. Guess how long I have until I'm gracing Ibiza with my awesome
presence and stunning dance skills? I'll let the fat woman from Total
Recall give you a hint.

Would You Like to Write for Power is a State of Mind?

Here at PIASOM I'm looking for guest bloggers to get involved. I want you to:1) Tell the world about the superb city of Greater Manchester. If know of something quirky, awesome, bizzare or important happening, why not get involved?2) Show me your ideas of producing great literature. Do you perform excercises at a writing group? Do you compete in poetry slams / rap battles? Are you setting up a magazine? Tell me and get your writing seen. More info:http://powerisastateofmind.blogspot.com/2011/03/would-you-like-to-write-for-power-is.html